03 December 2012

Sudhanva Deshpanda speaks in that lovely, bubbly
Indian English which it’s almost impossible not to like. His fellow panel
members at the Sprechwerk theatre last night alternated between speaking north German
(translated for Sudhanva) – which, in public at least, will tend toward the
analytical & the cold – and English. The discussion, under the heading ‘What
can theatre in public spaces achieve?’ was followed by a total of thirteen
people, including the panel members, so the thing felt like a ritual, where the
converted turned-up to validate the preachers. Despite that, Sudhanva conveyed
through use of photo-image and the word thought-provoking messages to his little
flock.

(Photo of Sudhanva Deshpanda)

Irregular
circles four metres by four metres forming a non-elevated stage, the crowd
pushed up within centimetres of the actors faces, others at the back of the
audience shimmied up onto a wall, or cycle-rickshaw or each other’s shoulders
to get a glimpse: slides of this sort formed the evening’s core. Taken from Mr
Deshpanda’s thirty years experience doing street theatre in India, to crowds
ranging from a hundred to twenty-thousand. The use of black & white to
photograph performances even into the 1990s, perhaps out of choice rather than
necessity, accented the ancient, ritualised atmosphere emanating from the
images. And all these audience members, and all these performances – nigh on
250 per year – brought to life without one cent of institutional funding.

Because
Mr Deshpanda’s theatre is almost entirely funded from donations that the
audience give after the performance; as the audiences are 95 % poor, the
average donation given is by western standards tiny. But large audiences,
frequent performances & a philosophy of spending very little on play
development, costume, stage set & even transport means that the theatre has
flourished with these simplest of economics.

All a
very far cry from street theatre in Hamburg. Tom Lanzki, who took part, this
year, with his company Bängditos in Altona’s international festival of street
arts – STAMP – informed the audience how STAMP 2013 has already been cancelled,
as the organisers know in advance they won’t hit their ‘minimum’ budget of €
200 000 – a budget under which, apparently, ‘none of the organisers earn
anything.’ This being the budget for a three day street-arts festival. The
irony in the room – that Mr Deshpanda & his team have for years produced a
torrent of theatre with no institutional nor corporate funding, while the
people from STAMP, already institutionally funded by the city of Hamburg &
the district of Altona, are making a political show of cancelling because they’re
not getting their two hundred grand – was probably just too huge for anybody to
find the energy to mention it directly. Perhaps the people from STAMP & all
the other ‘nothing under two-hundred-thousand Euro’ lot out there should pay
heed to Mr Deshpanda’s closing message from yesterday. In a world where
everyone’s dying to broadcast themselves to the maximum possible audience – you’ve
gotta have your snazzy website, facebook-fan page, google-ads; then twitter it –
the real task in hand is to narrow-cast ourselves. Think not what the phantom
ten thousand online might think of you – they are neither listening nor
concentrating properly – think what, if anything, you have to say, live, to the
ten or the one hundred. Then get into your street-theatre, pulpit, mosque, Buddhist
retreat, atheist club, coterie reading audience or sport’s-club board of
directors. And go and say it. Heart to heart and intellect to intellect.